A Better Mantrap

CONVERSION

When you love a woman you can forgive her for doing almost anything – but there has to be a limit.

And Sharly went way beyond that limit at 3.17 on the afternoon of June 12.

I know the exact moment it happened because the whole thing was recorded, though at a distance, by Arnie Archbold. He was making his scheduled round of Level Eight, pacing himself so as to be near the coffee machine when it came to break time, and was so wrapped up in visions of burying his nose in a hot foaming beaker that at first he wasn’t even aware of Sharly on the gallery above him. His recorder picked her out, though.

All members of Icewell Security, myself included, wear wide-angle buttonhole machines which serve roughly the same purpose as flight recorders on aircraft – if one of us gets himself totalled the investigation team can run a tape through afterwards and settle back in comfort and decide what went wrong. To be fair, the recorders often provide valuable retrospective evidence concerning accidents and equipment failures, and I guess I should have been grateful that there was no doubt, none whatsoever, about what Sharly did. I was off the island on a five-day course at the time it happened, but the tape showed everything…

She came out of the Field Analysis suite on Level Nine and walked slowly in the direction of Structure Telemetry on the south side of the well. Nothing in her gait or manner suggested she was under any kind of stress. That was something to which I could testify because we had been lovers for some months and, although she was wearing a loose-fitting heatsaver, I could visualize the fine lazy action of every muscle in her body. She even, and it hurt me every time I watched it on playback, performed one of her most characteristic tricks with her hair – pushing the curls upwards slightly from the nape of her neck with one hand as though they were little springs upon which she was carrying out a compression test. I had seen Sharly do that a hundred times in reality, always when she was relaxed and pleased with herself and feeling good about life, and that made what came next all the more shocking.

About ten paces from the door to Structure Telemetry she came to an abrupt halt and clapped her hands to her temples. She rocked backwards and forwards for a few seconds, then turned towards the centre of the well. The blow-ups from Archbold’s tape gave us a good look at her face in that crucial moment, and I pray never again to see anything so close to The Scream. Her eyes and mouth were circular black wounds, deep, incurable. She advanced to the gallery’s safety rail, went up the four bars as though they were steps of a ladder, and walked off the top one into space.

Cold, empty, unforgiving, lethal space.

The sudden movement attracted Archbold’s attention and dragged him around, with the result that all who studied his recorder tape got a clear view of Sharly’s body plunging down into the well. There were lights down there, but they only had the effect of deepening the blackness in between, and her writhing figure disappeared into a complicated nether world of pipe runs, valves, ice bulwarks and pools of oil and oil-scummed seawater. She made no sound on the way down and the final impact was lost amid the massive heartbeats of the primary pump.

That’s all there was to it.

Charlotte Railton had been part of the world scene as a warm, intelligent, humorous person for twenty-six years, and suddenly – for no reason that I could fathom – she was gone. They didn’t even manage to find her remains. The investigators who arrived next day by copter concluded that the body had been drawn into one of the main drainage outlets and expelled into the sea. They only stayed a day-and-a-half before heading back to Port Heiden and I received a distinct impression that if Sharly hadn’t been a Grade One Engineer they would have taken off much sooner.

I resented that a lot. In fact, resentment was the driving force that got me through the following weeks. I felt other emotions, of course – grief, despair, anger, self-pity – but I was able to keep them in check by concentrating on my sense of outrage over all that had happened. One playback of Archbold’s tape was enough to satisfy everybody concerned that they were dealing with a straightforward suicide, and from that point on the case was virtually closed. My testimony that Sharly had not been a suicidal type and had, in any case, been in excellent spirits immediately prior to her death was politely noted and dismissed as not being relevant. The evidence of the tape was all that mattered, and even I had to acknowledge it.

That was what helped crystallize my resentment against Sharly herself. Widows and widowers often feel anger – even though it is rarely expressed – towards their departed spouses for having spoiled everything by dying, and I came to know exactly what goes on in their minds. At times I actually hated Sharly for the pain she had caused me, then a reaction would set in and guilt would be added to all my other emotional burdens, and to help me squeeze out from under I would get out of bed, put on my uniform, sling the carbine on my shoulder and go patrolling the chill dark reaches of Icewell 37. I don’t know what I was hoping to find. I wanted to blame something for Sharly’s death, but the rational part of my mind told me there was no chance of encountering a convenient and suitable external agent. There was no malign ghost of Level Nine, and even had there been it was unlikely that it could have been exorcized by a spray of high-velocity bullets.

The well is a creepy and fear-making place, though, especially at night. It is an artificial island constructed from ice, and it’s hard for a non-scientist like me to accept that the localized coldness which makes it possible is imported from interstellar space.

Sharly knew as much about the telecongruency warp as anybody and she used to waste hours trying to make me understand how the focal point of the warp generator actually existed in two places at once – one of them here in the middle of the Bering Sea, and the other at some unknown location between the stars where the temperature was close to absolute zero. The position of the alpha-locus, the Earth-based focal point, could be accurately controlled and it was automatically drifted all over the island to keep the ice structure hard and strong, but nobody had any idea of the spatial location of the zeta-locus. Apparently it could have been just about anywhere in the universe. I never really got used to the idea of dangling a kind of cosmic fishing line in a distant part of space, but the notion held no fears for Sharly. It buoyed her up.

“This is only the beginning,” she had assured me once. “The telecongruency warp is a powerful tool, but right now we’re only debasing it. Using it as a heat sink to create ice castles in the ocean is easily the cheapest and best way yet of building deep-sea oil wells, but that’s only playing with the concept. What we have to do is gain control. We ought to be able to reverse the potentials, make it a two-way thing. We should be able to pinpoint the zeta-locus anywhere we want it – and when that happens we’ll be able to grow food or gather diamonds or pick flowers on any planet in the galaxy.”

When she talked that way I used to get jealous because the disks of misty white light appearing in her eyes were exactly the same as when we were making love and it was going well, but I had sense enough to keep my mouth shut about how I felt. Most people were surprised over a woman of her background taking up with a sergeant in Icewell Security, and as I couldn’t quite believe it myself sometimes I knew not to strain my luck. And in the end it was Sharly’s luck that ran out, not mine. She would never have the chance to pick those alien blossoms and I desperately wanted to know why.

I even, and this shows how obsessive my thinking became, considered murder. Post-hypnotic suggestion was one method I dreamed up – it seemed to me that somebody could have implanted a command for Sharly to walk off that gallery railing. Then there were exotic drugs which could suddenly trigger a self-destructive urge, and sonic beams which might scramble the brain and produce instant madness. Far-out ideas like those clamoured through my mind for hours on end, accompanied by equally bizarre notions about possible motives, so I was in a pretty abnormal psychological state during those nights when I was up there prowling on the high levels with the carbine nudging me in the back like a secretive accomplice. And I guess that’s why I sensed there was something badly wrong as soon as Lieutenant Oliver came through on my personal radio.

“Sergeant Hillman,” he said in an irritated voice when I had identified myself and reported my position, ‘what are you doing there? According to the roster you went off duty six hours ago.”

“I know that, sir, but I couldn’t sleep tonight,” I told him, raising my wrist set to my mouth. “I decided to do an extra shift.”

“You decided to…’ Oliver sounded incredulous now, as well as irritated. Obviously the idea of a man choosing to walk the galleries at three in the morning when he could have been wrapped up warm in bed was hard for him to ingest. “Did you, by any chance, arrange to do Sergeant Dresch a favour and take over his shift for him?”

“No, sir.”

“Then why can’t I raise Dresch or anybody else in the duty room?”

“Don’t know, sir. He was there okay less than an hour ago when…” I stopped speaking as it dawned on me that it had been quite a long time since I had heard the elevator shuttling between any of the lower levels. Maddern and Katzen were the two men assigned to do the inspection rounds that night and neither was the type to use the stairs when there was any other option. I went to the rail and looked down into the well. The galleries below formed concentric circles, all of them beaded with lamps, surrounding the dimly-seen shapes of the wellhead equipment. A freezing mist drifted over everything, giving the most distant lamps the appearance of illuminated balls of lime-coloured candy-floss. The primary pump was beating steadily down there, transferring oil to the outer tanks, and I could hear the faint sound of ocean waves coming through the ice walls, but there was no sign of any human activity. There was no waving of flashlights or bellowing of supposed witticisms – two favourite pursuits of men on night inspection.

I eased the sling of the carbine off my shoulder and raised my eyes to scan the one gallery remaining above me. Saboteurs often came in over the top when they were mounting an all-out showpiece attack on a well, but I could see nothing up there apart from a circle of unblinking lights and a few stars barely piercing the greenish haze. Not comforted, I allowed the rifle to slide into my right hand.

“What are you doing, Sergeant? Are you still there?” Oliver was calling from Field Control, more than half-a-kilometre away at the opposite end of the island, and he was sounding increasingly annoyed. He didn’t seem unduly alarmed at that stage, but I was the one who had been living on nerves for three weeks. I was the one who was keyed up to see spectres of death in every swirl of mist.

“I’ve been looking around,” I said, keeping my voice low. “It all seems quiet.”

“It is quiet – that’s what this is all about. See if you can raise Dresch on your ops band.”

I pressed the priority-call button on my wrist set and got no reply. “He isn’t answering.”

“Damn! You’d better get yourself down to the duty room and see what he’s playing at. Tell him to contact me immediately. And Hillman?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Tell him he’d better have one hell of a good excuse for this.”

“Right!” I spoke crisply to conceal my deep uneasiness about the situation. The fact that it was three in the morning had something to do with it – three in the morning was a bad time, specially for somebody in my frame of mind – but, also, it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that Icewell 37 was under some form of attack. A mental scenario unfolded before me. International terrorist group… approach by submersible… take out guards by knife, silenced gun or gas… plant bombs… I could walk into anything down there, anything at all.

Even the thing that killed Sharly Railton.

The thought heaved itself into the full light of my consciousness like some leviathan breaking the surface of a prehistoric swamp, bringing about an instantaneous and profound change in my outlook. It happens that way sometimes. You can be alone in spooky circumstances, alone but perfectly at ease, then a change takes place. Not in your surroundings, but inside you. An unseen hand is laid on your shoulder and an unheard voice whispers a few words of warning, and suddenly you’re scared. And what makes it even more terrifying is that the silent voice is the voice of a friend. It is rueful, reproachful, concerned. Not only had you let your guard down, you had forgotten why we all need a guard in the first place – and that was oh so foolish…

“This is crazy,” I said, half-aloud, my gaze travelling on a circuit of Level Nine. The regularly spaced lights reflected off the back-drop of ice and from the prefabricated huts that housed an auxiliary power unit and some structural telemetry equipment. I knew that both huts were securely locked, and I had just come down from a tour of Level Ten, so the next logical step was to check out the gallery below and gradually work down to the duty room on Level Three. The elevator was only a short distance away, but it was a noisy, open-cage affair – a good way of advertising my exact movements to all and sundry.

I bolted a cartridge into the breech of the rifle, slipped the safety off and walked quietly to the nearest stair. The tower-like structure of the stairwell vibrated underfoot, and I cursed as I imagined it broadcasting messages about my position. I went down the four zigzagging flights that took me to Level Eight, then did a cautious circuit of the entire gallery. Everything was as it should have been, and it was the same story on Level Seven and the two below that. Icewell 37 appeared to be running itself with its usual efficiency and there was no real need for human beings to fuss around the place at all – which was the principal reason for the rather hefty consumption of strong liquor on the night shift.

Now that I thought of it, Bert Dresch had been somewhat red of face and pink of eye when I saw him an hour earlier. It was possible that he was out cold in the office – it had happened before – and that Maddern, Katzen and the others were labouring to get him fit enough to answer his calls. The idea perked me up considerably and I was in a more relaxed mood when I began the circuit of Level Four. I even considered leaning over the rail and bellowing a few choice obscenities in the general direction of the duty room, which was basically a square hole cut into the ice on a level with the gallery below.

That was when I began to find small pieces of Dave Maddern.

I didn’t even know what they were at first.

I was about a third of the way around Level Four when I saw that the metal floor of the gallery was badly cluttered up for a distance of about ten paces, as if somebody had spilled a couple of sacks of coal and had just let the pieces lie. Drawing closer, I saw that the fragments were deep red in colour, although it was difficult to be too certain in the artificial light. I disturbed several of them with my feet and found they were as hard as glass, and my next thought was that there had been an accident with some deep-frozen melons. Then I began to notice the whiteness of bone and a few seconds later saw three-quarters of Dave’s face lying on the metal deck, like a discarded fright mask.

The shock seemed to clear my perceptions, for in that instant I became aware of other kinds of fragments lying around. There were irregular pieces of clothing – not with ragged edges, but as cleanly snapped as candy. There even were pieces of Dave’s carbine, his helmet and his boots mingling with the glittering, dark-hued shards of what had been his flesh and internal organs.

“Oh, man,” I whispered. “Oh, man!”

Suddenly fastidious about what my feet might accidentally touch, I tiptoed through the human debris, going faster and faster until I reached the uncontaminated part of the gallery at a near-run. The only conventional way of utterly destroying a man, as Dave Maddern had been destroyed, would have been to immerse him in a vat of liquid oxygen and then go to work on the frozen body with a sledge hammer – but there was another possibility.

All icewell personnel were assured that it was impossible for the alpha-locus to wander from its prescribed path. A computer and triplex controls kept it moving in a regular and pre-ordained pattern through the island, continuously reinforcing the ice structure with the unthinkable coldness of space – but since when had men been able to build perfect machines? What if accidents sometimes did happen? We were busy sucking the last drops of oil from the Earth’s crust, using new techniques that had been born of a desperate need, and no government in the world would draw back on account of a few operational mishaps. It would be perfectly natural to conceal the fact that every now and then there was a glitch in the telecongruency warp system, that every now and then the controls wavered and sent an invisible killer cruising through icewell living quarters. The bleak focus of interstellar cold would only have to brush through a man once to turn him into a crystalline statue.

I wasn’t thinking as clearly as that while I ran for the stair that led down to the duty room. Shock, revulsion and fear had numbed my brain to the extent that I could scarcely nail down a coherent thought, and to make matters worse silent voices were screaming at me, hurling confused questions. Is this what you’ve been looking for?

What have you really explained about Dave Maddern? Was Sharly, in some way that you don’t yet understand, driven over that rail? All right, you’ve frozen Maddern to death – but who or what broke him up like so much peanut brittle? And why?

I clattered down on to Level Three and sprinted a short distance along the gallery to the bright rectangle of the duty room window, but slid to a halt just before reaching it, all instincts of self-preservation newly alerted.

The place was cold.

Icewells, by their very nature, are chilly places and our part of the world never warmed up, even in the middle of summer, but this was a different sort of coldness. It was hostile, totally inimical, far more so than the polar wind, and I sensed – even before looking into the room – that it was a bad omen.

Perhaps there had been three men in the room, perhaps as many as half-a-dozen. I wasn’t able to say for sure, because the entire floor area was covered with a gruesome organic rubble, the redness of which was slowly beginning to disappear under a coating of rime frost. The furniture in the room was quite untouched, but its occupants had been pulverized, degraded, robbed of every last vestige of their humanity. Had it not been for the previous experience with Maddern I wouldn’t even have recognized them for what they were.

And, reacting according to a classic human pattern, I had two virtually simultaneous thoughts: Thank God that didn’t happen to me, and, How can I make sure it doesn’t ever happen to me?

There was no room behind my eyes for anything but those two linked expressions of self-interest. I turned towards the elevator, determined to ride it up to Level Ten and the starlit surface of the island, and it was then that I saw the thing with many legs.

It was huge – easily the size of a car – black and nightmarish, and it was rushing towards me with hideous, soul-withering speed. There was no time to think, only to react, and so I did the most natural thing in the world.

I grabbed the gallery rail and vaulted over it into space.

For a second or so I fully expected to die – just as Sharly had done – but the remarkable thing was that I didn’t mind. I had avoided being taken by the black obscenity and in that first airborne instant nothing else mattered – then I hit a large-diameter pipe and caromed off it into a latticed stanchion with a force that came near to breaking my ribs. My carbine flailed away into the dimness as I tried to throw my arms around the stanchion, but I had gained too much impetus for that to work and I continued falling, slithering, bouncing, impacting with steel, with lagged pipes, and finally with sloping buttresses of ice. Seemingly a long, long time after clearing the rail at Level Three I found myself lying on my side in a shallow pool of water. The surface below me was cold soft mud, and I knew I was almost right down on the seabed. All the complex structures and machinery associated with the wellhead towered up somewhere above me in a spatial confusion of shadows and areas of wan, misty light.

I lay without moving for an indeterminate period, not so much recovering from the fall as trying to construct a new version of reality in which there was a place for the horror I had glimpsed before jumping. I have been told many times since that I didn’t actually see anything on Level Three. The theory is that human beings are naturally programmed, that we are incapable of perceiving any phenomenon which lies beyond the in-built limitations of our world-picture. I had faced a manifestation which inspired me with the ultimate dread, and I therefore had endowed it with the attributes of dread, which in my case happened to be a multiplicity of legs. All that might account for my impression that the thing, although black in colour, was transparent to some degree, like a badly done special effect in a movie, but I’m not sure if I really can accept all that stuff about the limits of perception. The people who are so positive about it have no idea what it was like to be there at the time, and I knew I had seen something big and black and with a lot of legs.

The trouble was that I wasn’t certain of anything else. A kind of detachment had stolen over me as I lay there in the bilges of the icewell – waiting for my breath to return and for my body to give some evidence, one way or the other, about its general condition – and I was able to think more rationally than one might have expected. But I couldn’t fit the pieces together. A number of my friends had died in a particularly horrendous manner, but to me the cause had seemed highly technical – I had predicted something like an intermittent fault in a computerized control system – and what had showed up was the worst possible embodiment of ancient nightmares and superstitions. Coincidence? Not likely. Impossible was more like it, but what sort of creature could or would turn its victims into ice and crunch them into a bloody slush? And where in God’s name had it come from? There had to be something missing somewhere, a connection I had failed to make.

Still numb with sensory overload, I raised myself to a sitting position and tried to make a decision about what to do next. I wanted to get away from the well and reach Field Control at the other end of the island, and there were only two possible routes – through the service tunnel at Level Nine or along the surface from Level Ten. Both alternatives involved passing through the region of the well where the black thing stalked the galleries, and I had a powerful aversion to doing that. I put my wrist set to my mouth and tried calling up Lieutenant Oliver. There was no reply. Either the radio was broken, or the nightmare creature had roved further afield.

Perhaps I was the only person left alive on the entire island…

Repressing violent spasms of shivering, I looked around in the cavernous dimness and tried to establish exactly where I was. Faint reflections marked numerous dark pools, and there was no way of telling which might be drain tunnels through which waste liquids were pressure-pumped into the sea. This part of the well was a Stygian no-man’s-land, visited very infrequently by maintenance inspectors, and to get out of it I would have to locate a ladder and climb it to the first gallery. I decided the most likely place would be near the automatic pumping station which was steadily pounding somewhere off to my left, rippling the reflected lights.

Turning in that direction, I lurched to my feet and immediately became aware of a pale object a few paces away. My eyes still hadn’t adjusted properly to the darkness, but the object seemed to have human proportions. It was slumped against a discarded wooden box in much the same attitude as a rag doll would have assumed. I stared at it, trying not to cringe, as a terrible idea wormed into my mind followed by an equally terrible dawning of recognition.

Sharly!

I had found Sharly’s body.

Extraordinary situations, I have learned, elicit extraordinary human responses. I was already far too shocked by what had been happening to react to the ghastly discovery in a normal manner – instead I felt a pang of rage, resentment and hatred towards the so-called investigators from Icewell Exec who had been so careless, so anxious to get back to their warm offices on the mainland, that they had allowed a thing like this to happen. Had they done their job properly, Sharly would have been found three weeks earlier and given a decent burial. She wouldn’t have been left to bloat and rot down here in the oil well’s stinking black sump.

I think it was with some notion of determining the full extent of the investigators’ crime that I approached Sharly’s body and knelt down before it. My gaze hunted over the human wreckage, recording the sickening distortions of the broken legs, the multiple seepages of blood through her clothing, the lacerations which had disfigured that beautiful face…

Oddly, though, very oddly, Sharly’s head was upright, not touching the wooden box, apparently supported by a firm neck.

Stricken, bemused by new visions of horror, I slowly put out my hand and touched her cheek. The blackly contused eyelids snapped open.

“Hello, Jack,” she burbled. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

I screamed. Throwing myself backwards from her, I screamed as only a person who has been totally betrayed by reality knows how. There are some things that simply never should happen to a person, and one of them had happened to me and my entire being protested about it until the moment when screaming was no longer enough. Eventually I had to look at Sharly again and try to cope with the situation.

“Don’t be afraid of me, Jack,” she said in a voice which seemed to force its way through a larynx filled with water. “I can’t harm you.”

“You… are… dead,” I accused, raising myself to a sprinter’s crouch in readiness for the flight which might become necessary at any second.

She smiled, and to this day I wish she hadn’t. “How can I be dead if I’m talking to you? Come on, Jack – take me out of here.” She extended her arms, begging for my help.

For a moment I wavered. I wanted Sharly to be miraculously alive, and I was in no condition to think rationally. Perhaps she had survived the fall – just as I had done. Perhaps she had somehow managed to cling on to life down here in spite of her awful injuries and the cold and the wet. Then I noticed that the effort of speaking, of expelling air, had caused black fluids to spill down her chin. I backed off a little further, shaking my head.

She must have been able to interpret the reaction because she lowered her arms and the ghastly caricature of a smile left her face. “I wanted to die,” she said. “I tried to die, but it was no use. I may have to live a very long time… but I don’t want it to be down here, Jack… not like this. You’ve got to help me.”

“I… I don’t understand.” That was true – and most of all I couldn’t understand what was keeping me from running. Perhaps it was just that my mind had reached its saturation point as far as horror and fear were concerned, enabling me to hold my ground and carry on something like a normal conversation.

“Perhaps you understand better than you realize…” Her throaty, bubbling voice was almost lost in the sound of the primary pump. “I was supposed to be the great warp engineer, but your instincts were better than mine, Jack. You said it was like… dangling a fishing line in a distant part of the universe. I laughed at that because I knew how empty space actually is… but we caught something… then it caught me.”

I nodded because it seemed the only thing to do. A black multi-legged nightmare was roaming the icewell above me, presumably in search of new victims, and I was crouching in the throbbing darkness at the bottom of the well beside the undead corpse of the woman I had loved. And all I could do was nod my head.

“Zeta-loci are highly visible objects as they drift about the galaxy… to certain kinds of senses, that is… I was being pursued…wrong word – a virus does not pursue its host… tried to escape through the zeta-locus, but found I was trapped… chose the most suitable instrument of change, but there was resistance…”

The hissing beat of the pump was obliterating many words, words whose import was totally bizarre, but I was oddly – almost telepathically – in tune with what was being said to me. My understanding was only partial, but it came quickly because I was preconditioned. I had believed all along that Sharly’s was not an ordinary suicide. She had been possessed by a disembodied life form that the icewell’s warp had somehow dredged from out of space, and rather than submit to it she had walked off the top rail of Level Nine. The tragedy was that her bravery had been in vain. The life force that had locked itself on and into her was so powerful and tenacious that it could compel a ruined body to go on living. Sharly was now Sharly-Plus, and her main preoccupations were those of an alien being…

“I can’t walk on these legs, Jack,” she was saying in her laboured gargling voice. “The bones are smashed… no longer work as levers… but the arms are all right… and you could get me to Field Control, Jack. You remember how I used to talk about reciprocity… the need for a two-way exchange… I know how to do it now … you can make it possible for me to escape…”

“You’re too late,” I said harshly, marvelling at my ability to think and speak. “The thing you’re running from – it’s already here.”

“But that’s impossible!” Her head turned jerkily. “I would have known… my senses can’t be so…”

“I jumped from Level Three to get away from it. They’re all dead up there.”

“So that’s why you’re here… I thought I had finally managed to get through to you…” Her eyelids closed, wavered and opened. “But you couldn’t have escaped from a Taker so easily… Did you see it?”

“I saw it, all right.” The memory made my present situation almost bearable. “Black thing. Legs.”

“How big?”

“It was the width of the gallery.”

“That means it’s still trying to emerge… still tied to the alpha-locus…” Her eyelids flickered again, interrupting her blind white stare like signal lamp shutters. “Jack, you’re going to carry me to Field Control…”

I still think there must have been some element of mental control involved, in spite of all she told me about the nature of the Takers and what it would mean to this planet if one of them were to be set free here. Otherwise, I don’t know how I could have borne to pick her up. She stank, my once-beloved Sharly did, and she was cold and the lower half of her body felt like pieces of miscellaneous junk in a plastic sack. Perhaps the worst thing of all was the way she slid her arm around my neck. The movement felt so natural it reminded me that Sharly wasn’t truly dead, that her own original personality was trapped in the decaying shell, being used by an alien creature which had no right to be on Earth. For an instant I almost squeezed her, to try communicating across the gulf that separated us, but commonsense reasserted itself just in time.

“The alpha-locus is programmed to pass through each region of the ice structure once in every two hours,” came the throaty voice in my ear as I stood up with a dead weight in my arms. It is now at the far end of the island and dropping to the lowest level. That means it will be back here at the well in less than five minutes, bringing the Taker with it. It will pass very close to this point, and the Taker will have emerged more fully by then, so it will appear to be much larger. We must reach Level Five or higher within the next four minutes.” The engineering analysis of our situation made use of Sharly’s knowledge, but there was a clinical quality in the phrasing which told me it was Sharly-Plus who was speaking. And she was informing me that I had to move quickly or die.

Guided by the sound of the pump, I lurched in that direction with my burden. The surface underfoot was hidden in a slurry of mud, oil and water, and was made more treacherous by the presence of industrial detritus – pieces of cable, submerged metal bars and slimed sections of timber. I kept falling to my knees and each time that happened it was harder to stand up again. Only numbness and shock kept me from realizing the extent of the punishment I had taken during the hurtling descent from Level Three. By the time I located the ladder which slanted up to the first gallery I had serious doubts about my ability to climb it, but the thing I was carrying gave assistance, reaching for higher rungs with eager hands and pulling upwards with unnatural strength. There was no mistaking the urgency which galvanized those limbs and fingers. Sharly-Plus and I had one thing in common – we were both deathly afraid of the Taker and wanted to get as far away from it as was possible in the time available.

I had no check on how quickly our time was running out, but it seemed to me that four minutes had passed when I reached the elevator and found that the passenger cage was somewhere high above, lost in the alternating circles of light and dark. There was a dead silence after I thumbed the call button. For a panicky moment I thought the power was off, then the steel lattice enclosing the elevator shaft began to thrum. I instinctively glanced at Sharly, got my first good look at her face in adequate lighting and turned away with my eyes closed.

Standing there in the self-imposed darkness I could almost sense the alpha-locus racing back through the length of the island and carrying with it the night-black antithesis of life I had glimpsed earlier, still trapped and squirming, but grown much bigger now, more capable of destroying me without even being aware of my existence. A Taker, from what I had learned, was less of a malevolent being than an unconscious agent of entropy. It seemed to be a kind of materialized force which reacted blindly against organization in matter or energy, but the outcome was just the same as if it were a hate-crazed animal which had scented my blood and was coming to claw me apart. Every nerve in my body was telling me that I ought to be running for my life, and all I could do was stand there on the first gallery and pray for the elevator to arrive. It seemed to me that the air was growing noticeably colder.

When the cage finally clanged to a halt in front of me I grabbed for the sliding door, but Sharly was already dragging it open. The air was colder now, filled with a premonitory chill. Sick with fear, I stumbled into the cage and pressed the button for Level Ten. There was another silence, the machinery playing cruel pranks again, then the cage began its painfully slow climb. I counted the numbers painted at each level. Two. Three. Four.

It was when the cage was passing Level Five that the Taker went by not far beneath us. I didn’t see anything this time, but a convulsion went through the upper part of Sharly’s body and I felt the temperature in the cage momentarily dip to sub-Arctic levels. For a few seconds I was unable to breathe. I stood perfectly still and wished miserably that I could be somewhere warm and safe and very far away from Icewell 37.

“The alpha-locus is programmed to describe an ascending helix around the well shaft,” Sharly husked. “Multiple passes may be required in some areas – I can’t say without the hourly report on wave and tide action – but the entire operation is unlikely to take more than thirty minutes. When it is completed the locus will make a scan-pattern return on the surface of the island, terminating at Field Control. We must get there well ahead of it. Do you understand?”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. Field Control was actually a converted trawler housing all the essential telecongruency warp generating and control equipment. Two years earlier, working by satnav, it had taken up station near the drilling site and had built around itself a rectangular island of ice. The well and the embedded ship were at opposite ends of the artificial island, and I would have to travel the length of it with Sharly. That in itself wasn’t much of a problem, because there were Moke transports for communal use both on the surface and in the Level Nine connecting tunnel. My main worry was about what would happen at the far end. There was no way, especially in the time available, of explaining the facts to a man like Lieutenant Oliver, yet I couldn’t see how I was going to get Sharly-Plus into the warp control room unobserved.

I was still trying to think constructively about the matter when the cage reached Level Ten and jolted to a halt. We were in a small machinery house situated on the topmost gallery of the well. When I opened the door I was very conscious of being on the surface. A strong, ocean-tanged breeze hustled noisily through the various superstructures, and the clustered lights of Field Control were visible at the far end of the island. The air was clear in comparison to the chilly mists that drifted far down in the icewell, and the moon was riding high overhead, looking serene and remote. Everything was deceptively normal.

“We must hurry,” Sharly said in her rattling whisper. ’There is very little time.”

Trying to avoid looking directly at her, I turned my head and saw there were three open-sided Mokes parked only a few paces away. I went to the nearest and placed the undead body in the rear seat, wincing at the pain which needled through my side as I bent forward. With a considerable effort of will, I tucked one of the shattered legs inside the line of the vehicle and made to climb into the driving seat.

“Where are you going, Hillman?” a man’s voice called. ’What do you think you’re doing?”

Lieutenant Oliver came striding towards me from the shadow of a crane shed, a borrowed carbine in hand. His oval face was pink with anger and exposure, and the overlong sandy moustache he had grown to make himself look more mature was bending this way and that in the wind. The winter-weight coat he had put on seemed several sizes too large, giving him something of the appearance of an extra in a low-budget movie, but I’d had run-ins with him before and knew him to be an ambitious man who jealously guarded his career prospects.

“I’ve got to get down to Field Control right away,” I said. “There’s no time to explain now.”

“Sergeant! Am I hearing you right?”

“You’d better,” I replied heavily, ‘because I’m only going to say it once. Dresch and all the others who were on duty tonight are dead, torn apart. The thing that did the killing is still down there, around the lower levels, and there’s only one way to get rid of it.”

Oliver’s eyes narrowed. “Are you telling me there’s a bear or something loose on this well?”

“Not an ordinary animal.” I hesitated, aware of how ridiculous I was going to sound, but with no alternative but to press on with the story. “It’s some kind of alien thing the warp has sucked in from space. It killed Dresch and the others, and… Look, I’ve got to go.” I reached for the Moke’s ignition key.

“Don’t move!” Oliver stepped in front of the vehicle. “I think you’re drunk, Hillman. Falling-down drunk, by the look of you, and I’ll bet Dresch is worse.” He raised his wrist communicator to his lips. “Pilgrim and Dubois! Forget about checking out the galleries – go straight to the duty room. Pilgrim? Answer me, Pilgrim.”

“If you’ve sent them down the well, they’re dead. I can’t explain any more now, but you’d better grab yourself a power boat and get the hell off the island, and that’s the truth.” I switched on the Moke’s engine and in the same instant Oliver snapped his rifle up to point at my chest.

“Switch off and get out of the vehicle,” he ordered, moving around to my side.

I clenched and unclenched my fingers on the wheel, afraid of getting myself shot, but even more alarmed about this fresh delay in reaching Field Control. Vital seconds were flitting past – and the Taker was on its way.

“I’m warning you, Hillman,” Oliver said, drawing level with me, reaching a position from which he could get an unimpeded shot. “If you don’t switch off that eng…’ His voice faded out as he saw what lay on the Moke’s rear seat.

“It’s Charlotte Railton’s body,” I heard myself explain. ’I found it down in the bilges.”

“And you carried it up here! What’s the matter with you, Hillman?” Oliver moved closer to the inert body, apparently repelled and fascinated. “Nobody in his right mind carries a thing like…’

Somehow I knew what was coming next and was completely prepared for it. Oliver wasn’t. When Sharly snatched the rifle out of his hands he made a sound that was both a whimper and a moan, and which was drowned in the snarl of the Moke’s exhaust as I gunned the engine. The wheels spun for a moment on the plastic mesh which covered the working areas of the island, then we were accelerating down the vee-shaped perspective of lights which terminated in Field Control. I watched the mirror to see if Oliver would come after us in one of the remaining vehicles, but he simply stood there until I lost sight of him.

The ramp to the old trawler’s main deck usually had a guard on it, but I could see from quite a long way off that it was deserted, and it occurred to me that reaching the actual warp control room might be easier than I had anticipated. Oliver could have taken all available security men to the well with him, and as it was weekend there was a good chance that all the engineering staff had flown off to Alaska. If one or two had stayed behind, I had Oliver’s carbine with which to keep them in line while Sharly-Plus did whatever it was she needed to do.

I have to admit that I had no real understanding of what her plans were. Even if I had been able to hear her properly down in the bottom of the well, even had I been in any condition for absorbing abstruse ideas, I still wouldn’t have been able to understand. Sharly alone had always been able to think and talk rings around me – and now she was Sharly-Plus. There was another mind there, an alien mind accustomed to dealing with alien concepts, and in company with it my Sharly had travelled far beyond the bounds of contemporary human knowledge.

All I knew for sure was that the Taker was squirming through into my part of the continuum, and the only way to stop it was to get the dismaying object that was Sharly’s body into the field control room without any delay. I broadsided the Moke up to the base of the ramp on locked wheels, jumped out and gathered the body up in my arms. Again it slid one arm around my neck, but I was too far gone to notice much. I struggled up the ramp, crossed an area of deck and opened a door in the superstructure and got inside. The companionways in the trawler were narrow, certainly not designed for the carrying of awkward loads, but I caromed my way along them, bursting doors open with my shoulder until we were in the rebuilt part of the ship, the area which housed the warp controls. In contrast to the spartan conditions elsewhere, this was a region of thick carpet and indirect lighting, with one large window giving a longitudinal view of the island.

“Over there,” Sharly burbled in my ear, pointing at a long console before which were three swivel chairs. I lowered her into the nearest chair, only then becoming aware of a disturbing new facet of the situation. Until that moment I had been under the impression that my plunge from Level Three had left me with nothing but a selection of bruises and perhaps a fractured rib, but all at once there came the queasy suspicion that something inside me was ruptured and leaking. I had always purposely avoided medical knowledge and so was unable to make any kind of diagnosis, but there was a definite wrongness at the centre of my being, and its effects seemed to be spreading. Holding a stanchion for support, I examined my surroundings and found them curiously distant and unreal. Horizontal surfaces appeared to slope, and solid objects tended to shimmy.

This must be what it’s like to faint, I thought, bemused. Or perhaps this is the way you die!

There followed a period of blurry confusion. I clung to the stanchion, internally preoccupied, and was only dimly aware of what Sharly-Plus was doing. It meant nothing to me that she was moving herself from chair to chair by the strength of her arms, or that she was using the same physical power to strip cover plates from equipment banks and doors from cabinets. Other forces were at work too, because I know I saw drawers slide in and out by themselves, saw looms of wiring change shape like live creatures, heard the crackle of high-voltage current, smelt the ozone and the hot metal. I was in the presence of things far beyond my understanding. For a time Sharly-Plus was superhuman, perhaps supernatural, and she was imposing her unearthly will on artefacts of this Earth, changing their relationships and functions, moulding them to suit her own purpose. Stray currents of psychokinetic energy rippled the carpet, sent papers skywards like flocks of startled birds, tugged at my clothing. The very air hummed and crooned and was disturbed by strange flitting shadows. All I could do was stand there and try to endure.

The lull, the onset of silence, took me by surprise.

Fighting for a clearer picture of what was going on, I noted that Sharly-Plus, her head flung back at an unnatural angle, had ceased her labours and was staring at the window. I looked in the same direction and, in spite of all that had happened within and around me, I quailed.

The night-time scene was basically a familiar one – multiple rows of lights, flanking the helicopter pad and the STOL runway, converged on the accretion of greenish illuminated rectangles and points of brilliance which marked the head of the well shaft. The moon was too high to be visible from inside the control centre, but it sketched in a silver-grey background of ocean and cloud-vaulted sky pierced by stars.

And against that background something was moving. Something incredibly huge, and black, and with too many legs.

“Breakthrough… too soon,” Sharly-Plus breathed. She reached towards a tilted and displaced keyboard on the console and began to tap instructions into it at high speed. At the far end of the island the Taker loomed high above the cranes and machinery houses, its legs slowly windmilling across the sky, quivering, questing…

“Get away from here, Jack,” Sharly-Plus said, or it may even have been Sharly, for in that moment her voice was almost human. “Take a boat and go fast.”

I gaped at her back, nodded without speaking, then pushed myself away from the stanchion and ran, partially doubled over, for the ship’s entrance ramp. Whatever it was that was damaged inside me reacted by producing spasms of pain, nausea and weakness, and by the time I reached the bottom of the ramp I was sobbing aloud with every breath. It was only thirty yards to the jetty, but the crossing seemed to take a long time and all the while, at one corner of my vision, the night was hideously turbulent and alive.

I have no clear memory of reaching a boat, nor of starting the engine and casting off and heading out to sea. But in spite of being semi-conscious at the time, I can recall vividly what it was like when Sharly turned Icewell 37 into a miniature sun. I lay there, shielded by the gunwale, drowning in the sudden awesome wash of noontime brilliance.

It lasted less than three seconds, but when it was over the icewell and everything connected with it – including the Taker and the mortal remains of Sharly Railton – had vanished in a mile-high column of fire and steam. Clouds of vapour were rolling upwards to the stratosphere, and circular waves were racing towards the ocean’s distant shores with their message that a battle had been fought and won.

I lowered my head and wept till I lost consciousness.

They’ll never believe me!

The words of the old song kept mingling and merging with my own thoughts, interfering with all attempts at lucidity. I lay in that hospital bed for the best part of a day, fighting off the drugs that had cushioned my nervous system during the excision of the spleen, and my principal concern was that nobody would give my story credence. It was the kind of inversion of priorities which is typical of the semi-lucid state. I imagined myself to be in the situation which crops up so often in children’s fiction, the one in which all evidence of a fantastic adventure is maddeningly lost and the protagonist, if he speaks at all, meets knowing smiles of disbelief.

But I had forgotten about my buttonhole recorder.

It had continued working through the entire episode, and its tape became one of the single most valued artefacts in history, even though the evidence was imperfect in many ways. The Taker, for example, registered only as a vague area of darkness – with no sign of the legs which I had seen so distinctly; and the scene in Field Control was obliterated here and there because I had been clinging to the stanchion. However, the scientific and technical teams got most of what they wanted from it. They were able to see something of what Sharly-Plus had done to the warp control complex, to deduce others, and to make inspired guesses about much of the rest.

That was three years ago, and they believe that before another three have passed the first of the new breed of power stations will be operational. It will employ much the same equipment as an icewell, but with the big difference that the zeta-locus, instead of wandering blindly in space, will be positioned exactly where we want it. Instead of serving as a heat sink for the construction of ice islands, it will be used to import unlimited energy from the vicinity of the sun.

Visionaries, and there are quite a few of them in the scientific community, say it won’t be too long until we achieve the reciprocity that Sharly used to talk about, that an advanced form of the telecongruency warp is going to give us instantaneous travel to the stars. As Sharly once put it, “We’ll be able to grow food or gather diamonds or pick flowers on any planet in the galaxy.” I guess that’s the sort of memorial she would have chosen for herself.